


The Smallest Moments of the First War

by mustntgetmy, rscollabmods, spacerhapsody



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Break Up, Getting Back Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:43:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6998314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustntgetmy/pseuds/mustntgetmy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rscollabmods/pseuds/rscollabmods, https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacerhapsody/pseuds/spacerhapsody
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: A bad duel forces Sirius to reflect on things that happened before the war even began and moves him to change the course of the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smallest Moments of the First War

**Author's Note:**

> This collaboration was created as part of the 2016 round of [rs_collab](http://rs-collab.livejournal.com/)
> 
>  
> 
> **TEAM: Toujours Purple**

What does he remember? The first brush of magic against the insides of his fingertips, the swell of sparks that rose into the air like fireflies, burning small holes into the gray damask wallpaper, drawing cries from his mother. The first time he ever had gelato, passion fruit and chocolate, on the edge of some sunny palazzo, a bead of red on the edge of his father’s empty wineglass, his mother, laughing, at some joke he’d just made in Italian, the only time he’d ever see his mother laugh sincerely. The Sorting Hat falling over his eyes, its voice echoing in his mind, the small pause it made before it declared his new allegiance. The nights spent where he didn’t belong: a Slytherin son in a Gryffindor dorm, a student out of bed and out of bounds, a boy who made himself into an animal to run under the full moon’s light with a werewolf. The friends he made, the map they created, the names they gave each other. The laughter like an ache in chest and throat: James. The subtle slyness and sleight of hand: Peter. The gentle and the terrible, the rough kiss and the quiet rebuke, the tangled sheets and the too neat ties: Remus, Remus, Remus. The letters kept and the letters never sent: again, Remus. The last words spoken (“Alright?” “Yeah.”) and the glittering, malignant presence of everything that had been broken, a scattering of shattered glass between them. The force of his eyes, turned away. And now: the flash of green.

Sirius sees the spell is coming towards him, too fast to stop, too strong to deflect. He wants, badly, to live, and so he reacts with a reckless, violent swipe of his wand, no spell in his mind, just raw magic that ought to do little more than set his own wand on fire but which, instead, fells a nearby tree. The tree crashes, just in front of him, and then crumbles to ash, the spell devouring its life rather than his.

Things go quickly after that. Sirius retakes the offensive, driving back the Death Eater, his wand ominously hot beneath his fingers. He disarms him, casts a full body bind on him, and then he kneels and rips off the Death Eater’s mask. It falls from his fingers and lands with a soft thump in the grass. It shouldn’t surprise him anymore, how young some of them are, and yet he still gasps when he sees this one’s face. It’s just that he watched this one get sorted when he was in fourth year. Fourth year, the year he had his first kiss. Fourth year, the year he realized he liked boys. _But you were so young then_ , he thinks, and he’s not sure if he’s directed this thought at the young Death Eater or himself. He grabs hold of the boy and Apparates back to the Order, where Moody takes over to question him, and McGonagall looks over his still too-hot-to-the-touch wand.

“Twelve hours,” she tells him grimly. “If you try to push it, you’ll lose it. It might even explode, take your arm off with it. Do you have a spare?”

Sirius shakes his head.

McGonagall sighs, looks him over. Earlier in the war, when Benjy Fenwick had lost his wand in a duel, they’d assigned two other Order members to accompany him to Ollivander’s. But since then, they’d lost so many, and Benjy among them. There were no more luxuries like back-up on assignments or protection when you’d lost your wand. You fought or you spied and if you couldn’t manage either, you hid.

“Try to lay low,” McGonagall advises. He can see her biting back a comment on how twelve hours isn’t so long, but being wandless in wartime means every minute is an epoch, no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing. He puts on a brave face, which is the gift you give to the people you still liked and trusted, and leaves headquarters, unarmed.

He crosses the street, lingers under the eve of a darkened library, closed because it’s Sunday. He lights a cigarette and considers his options. He could go to a pub, embrace the safety of a crowd. Better yet, since night was falling, he could go to a club, get lost in the swirl of dancing bodies, sweat out some of the fear and the panic. Death Eaters didn’t go to Muggle pubs or clubs, but there was always the risk that one or two of them were out to kill some Muggles and get a little drink on in the process. It had been four months since Sirius had last read an article about something like that in the _Prophet_ , a gap of time just long enough for him to think the next attack might come soon. Tonight, even. He tosses off the butt of his cigarette and lights another, and tries to think of plan b.

It ought to have been James. Months ago, hell even weeks ago, he wouldn’t have thought of a club at all. He would’ve gone straight to James and Lily’s. He’d have slept on their couch and woken up to the smell of French toast and Harry’s cooing, his gummy grin as he lorded over the breakfast table in his high chair while Lily, in her yellow apron, at the stove, asked Sirius if he’d like coffee or tea, one eye on the skillet and the other on James as he dotingly fed Harry his breakfast. It would have been disorienting, as it always was, to see James with that particular grin he gave only to Harry, looking at once wonderstruck and tender. “My son,” he would say, whenever he could work it into the conversation. “My son, Harry.” Sirius would’ve made fun if he hadn’t been a little wonderstruck himself: every time Harry looked at him and clearly recognized him it was like being noticed by a celebrity. Me? Really? _You_ care about _me_? It would’ve been nice, really, to go there, make a joke about how he couldn’t get his wand to work – happens to men all the time, Padfoot, don’t worry, har har – and read Harry a bedtime story. It ought to have been the answer to his problem, if only James and Lily hadn’t had to go to ground three weeks ago because Voldemort had been close, so heartstoppingly close, to burning their house down around them. Voldemort’s personal obsession with the Potters had been the stuff of jokes for months (how easy it was to laugh at the idea of Voldemort as a jilted lover), but now the laughter had long since faded and James and Lily were in hiding.

So, not James then. And if not James, who? Peter? He dismisses this, almost instantly. Peter would take him in and hide him, of course, but he’d act nervous the entire time, jumping at every small noise, refusing to drink or talk about anything casual. The war had taken a lot from a lot of different people, but sometimes Sirius thought it had taken the most from Peter. It sometimes seemed like all the color had bled from him: his flat was a gray little warren, stuffed full of protection spells and wards, and containing nothing sharp for any wannabe intruder to use against him. It felt like an asylum and Sirius knew he couldn’t stand twelve hours there.

He had two options left, neither of them good. He could go to his flat, stay alone. He would have to break his own wards to get in, and he wouldn’t be able to reset them. He would have no defenses, no weapon. Nothing but that hope that tonight would be like every other he’d slept there, and there would be no disturbances.

Option two: Remus. Remus, who he hasn’t spoken to in five months. Remus, who he is no longer entirely sure is on their side. Remus, who had fired the first spell in the private little war between them.

He folds the remains of his cigarette between his fingers, lets the burning tip sear the joint of his forefinger, tears gathering in his eyes, remembering the things that had been said and the things that had been unsaid. He flicks the cigarette away, turns up the collar of his jacket. Be a sitting duck in his flat it was.

He Apparates to the dark corner of a park near his flat, waits the appropriate amount of time to be sure no one is following him, walks briskly along the jogging trail, pauses at a newsstand for half a minute to buy more cigarettes, and then goes up the steps to his front door. The wards bulge outward, a press of magic against his skin, and then they crumple like a bed sheet pulled taut and then let go. He hurries inside, locks the door, and then leans against it, finally allowing himself to feel what he could not when he had been out fighting in the field. This had almost been his last day alive. He had almost died today.

He laughs. He can’t help it. It’s a bad joke, a terrible, ecstatic joke. His life had almost culminated in a flash of green, the color he was swaddled in when he was first brought home from St. Mungo’s, the awfulness of his heritage from the beginning of his life to its end, as inescapable as his mother had always promised it was.

And yet, that was not what had happened. Again, he had proven her wrong, because here he was, in his flat with its decorative Muggle toaster, overabundance of albums (most of them in the wrong sleeves), unmade bed, and still unpacked Hogwarts trunk. Another narrow escape granted to him.

He laughs again, though this time it’s softer, rougher. He remembers the explosion of power that felled the tree. He remembers pulling the Death Eater’s mask off, the pale skin and the raised scar along his jaw, the sudden panic that this might be someone he knew, that this might be Remus, the instant relief when he saw the blonde hair and knew that it was not. He remembers, too, the moment the curse was aimed at him, the split second unraveling of his life, the sharp and sudden ache of all the things he left undone that prompted him to fire that wordless spell in the first place. Remembering this he feels torn: he had planned to have a drink and then to hold onto a knife while sitting in the corner of his flat farthest from the door for the rest of the night, but now he thinks of his trunk, and all the things he’s stored at its bottom, and how it might be nice, if this was to be his last day alive after all, to spend his dwindling hours with those things.

He’s caught, for a moment, between these two choices. They’re small choices, really, but small choices add up. Sirius doesn’t know this yet: about how the little things are the things that give everything away, and depending on the choice he makes he may never have to learn it. He deliberates and in half a minute he decides. He pushes himself away from the door and goes to the kitchen. After retrieving a knife, he goes to his bedroom and kneels before his trunk.

He barely glances at the textbooks or school robes as he pushes them to the side, pulls out sheaves of parchment in his own handwriting – essays, notes on Animagi transformations, doodles – and tosses a dud Dungbomb into the trash before he reaches the very bottom, where there’s another textbook, _A History of Magic_ by Bathilda Bagshot. He takes it out, opens it to the pages he’s hollowed out and pulls out the small stack of letters he’d hidden away there.

They crinkle in his fingers, release a soft scent of both parchment and the ineffable texture of summertime air, which is when they were first received and read. They’re all short letters, mostly, written in a clear, straight-lined hand, each word emanating the inimitable, quiet, clever touch of Remus Lupin. _I’ve finished all the summer homework, he wrote in the first one, and I know you think this is me opening myself up for mockery, but know this, I have an excuse! A very good excuse! The finest excuse, if the way you bandy it around is anything to go by: I was terribly, terribly bored. So you see, the prefect and the detention champion are not so different after all. A fine moral to an otherwise pointless story, don’t you think?_

_PS: is there a non-Animagi equivalent for saving a werewolf from himself during the daylight hours? And by “from himself” I mean the fingernails he’s bitten off in sheer, desperate boredom._

Just as he had when he had first opened this letter Sirius isn’t able to stop himself from grinning as he reads it now. He had never been able to figure out if it was Remus-on-paper who was less restrained, less careful, and more affectionate, or if this good humor of his was a product of the summer weather. Back then, it hadn’t mattered. All he had known was the wait between letters, and then the thrill of seeing Barnacle, the Lupin family owl, knocking his beak against his window, and then, at last, the letter, read and reread and reread again. It had not occurred to him to find this sudden interest in letter reading and writing odd until Remus himself commented on it. _I have to apologize to you for something, he wrote. I never thought you’d answer any of these back. If I had I think I would’ve tried to make the content more worth your time._

 _Why do you think this isn’t worth my time?_ Sirius had wanted to write, but didn’t. He had been sixteen, perhaps the most reckless and careless year of his life thus far, and still he had known intuitively that what was being built in these letters was too fragile to push on too hard, that there were certain things that couldn’t be said. He thinks it must have been the letters and not the weather because he was also different from his usual self whenever he wrote Remus back. There were drafts, plans, a careful cultivating of what he wanted to say, how he wanted to come across. He admitted to things he never would have face to face, like that his much discussed first kiss with Davey Gudgeon had actually been a disaster, as had the subsequent sex. He had painted this as a comedy, but the thing about Remus was that he understood that jokes were a mask, and had had written back, _You’ll find someone better. I doubt you’re going to end up alone, Pads._

Oh, he had been so careful with the response to that letter. It had been August, weeks from school starting, and then, he knew, there would be no more letters. He’d have Remus in person, but it would be the Remus who kept himself at a distance; it would not be this Remus, the Remus he had come to think of as only his.

 _Come visit_ , he’d said. _Just you and me._ Only he’d had to stretch these words into paragraphs, bury their outright meaning in oblique phrases, beneath which he layered another significant sentiment: _I think this could be something. Is this something?_

Remus had agreed to visit. He showed up on a Friday afternoon and left on a Sunday morning and somewhere in that time Sirius managed to kiss him in at least twenty-seven different ways, not including kisses that were left nowhere near Remus’s mouth, and Remus, breathtakingly, let him, and Remus, fantastically, kissed him back, and then gone home, only five ripe, raw days of summer left before they were reunited at King’s Cross.

And when there were only two days left, Remus’s last letter, which was also his longest letter, came.

 _I want to thank you_ , the letter had started, and Sirius had smiled. _But I also want to apologize._ And then it became apparent that the Remus who had written Sirius all summer had been replaced by his more constrained counterpart, and Sirius’s smile had faded, because with each word he wrote Remus was receding. Even past the lines where Remus had made it as plain as his mildness would allow, Sirius was still hoping it was a joke. He watched the belittling of this thing that he knew, now, wasn’t just made of parchment and ink, but something he had felt, something he had held. He wrenched his eyes away from the words “fun” and “fling.” He felt something tender being crushed in his chest.

He remembers what he wrote back, all those words designed to emanate pain. He remembers seeing Remus on the train platform, strain beneath his smile, but nothing more than that. He remembers the string of Ravenclaws he let into their dorm night after night. He remembers the way Remus had joked along with James and Peter about his sudden and evident priapism, as if he had no stake in it, as if he didn’t care. He remembers the exact sensation of that hurt, which constantly co-mingled with disbelief, a raw shock like a Killing Curse bolting from a wand aiming right at him. And he remembers the doubt as it began to seep out, infecting the things Remus said at Order meetings, the absences at gatherings, the steadiness of his hand as he flung powerful hexes. He had never wanted to think like this, he always reprimanded himself when he did, but there was always, always the niggling aside of these letters. Remus could be one person on paper, and another in person, so who was to say he couldn’t split himself further yet?

He reconsiders his decision not to have a drink and rolls the knife between his fingers. He touches his thumb to one of the earlier letters, runs it across Remus’s signature, then turns the knife over his hand and considers the best way to cut. He has the knife raised and the momentum coiled tight in his arm when an entirely different urge rolls through him. The urge is sudden and stupid and dangerous and he knows he has to do it.

He shoves the letters back into their hiding place in the book, puts the book and the knife in his jacket pockets as he rises from the floor, heads for the front door and leaves his flat. By now its full night and cool, summer dying, autumn on the rise. He returns to the park, his shoulders hunched, his pace fast, and Apparates from this park to another, on the other side of the city. He finds a small, dusty looking building and climbs five flights of stairs and only after he’s hammered on the door does it occur to him to wonder if Remus even still lives here anymore, and better yet, if he still lives here what are the odds he’s even home? But by the time he thinks of these things he can hear shuffling noises from inside the flat and then Remus’s voice saying, “Who is it?”

They go through the exchange everyone goes through these days. The dance of prepared questions with their specific answers. The questions are intimate and the answers are names, given to each other when they were barely out of boyhood, and on either side of the door both of them hopes that these answers are enough, that the door won’t open onto betrayal.

They both give the answers they’re supposed to and then Remus unlocks the door, wand in hand, and ushers Sirius inside. Sirius feels it in his pulse when Remus puts his wards back up and he looks around at Remus’s one room flat which is painstakingly neat and heartbreakingly bare. Just a mattress on the floor, a single wooden chair, books, and a hot plate, on which a small pot of what Sirius has to assume is canned soup is simmering.

“What’s the matter?” Remus asks. “Has something happened? Is James – has something happened?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Sirius says, wishing he’d thought to say it before Remus asked, but also thinking it suspicious that Remus so should quickly jump to James being in peril. “I just…I’ve had a hell of a day. Thought I’d…I wanted to come by for a bit.”

It’s a testament to how bad the war has gotten that he can away with saying just this and nothing more to someone he hasn’t seen in five months and there are no questions asked. Remus only nods once in that restrained way of his and then he gestures to his lone chair and says, “Well, feel free to take the seat.”

Sirius offers up a feeble grin, but he doesn’t sit, which he knows will mean that both he and Remus will stand the entire time he’s here, because there’s no way that Remus will take the only seat in his own flat when he has company. He looks Remus over, takes in the gray starting to show at his temples, the dark circles under his eyes, and the bandage on his hand, courtesy of the most recent full moon. He aches at the sight of him, as he always has since he was fifteen and he first understood what wanting meant, but now the feeling is so entwined with heartbreak and suspicion that it almost physically hurts to look at him.

“Thought you’d bring a little light reading?” Remus asks, jarring Sirius from his reverie. He realizes that as he had been looking Remus over, Remus had been looking him over, and that he’d seen _A History of Magic_ poking out of his pocket.

“Ah,” Sirius says, and he takes the book out, stares down at the ornate typography on the cover.

“I haven’t thought about that book in years,” Remus says, taking a step closer. “I hate to say anything against Dumbledore, but he really should let Binns go. He’s done more damage to the study of Magical History than the fires at Alexandria did to the lost magic of the Ancient Egyptians.”

 _Why does he feel the need to mention Dumbledore, to assert that he dislikes speaking out against him?_ Sirius wonders, and it is this thought that prompts him to toss the book into Remus’s hands, wordlessly.

Remus smiles and then, upon opening the book, struggles to suppress an aghast look. “Merlin. What have you done to this book? Have you cut out the pages? What is…” He sees the letters, opens the first one, and his expression instantly shutters. “You kept these,” he says. He touches the corner of one in his hand, delicately, just the way he had touched the side of Sirius’s face the morning after they’d first made love to wake him up. Just as he had then he retracts his fingers swiftly, suddenly conscious of himself. “Why did you keep these?” he asks.

“Why do you think?” Sirius says. When Remus won’t meet his eyes he has to ask. “What did you do with mine? Burn them? Use them to line Barnacle’s cage?”

“Profane a book with them?” Remus returns, raising an eyebrow, refusing to engage further. He looks down at the letters again and then, surprisingly, he smiles, although it’s a smile worn down at the edges by tiredness and loss, the way everyone smiles these days. “It’s so strange thinking about this time. Before graduation, before the war. Before all the losses…Marlene, the Bones’, Benjy…”

“I forgot,” Sirius says. “You were dating him.”

Remus looks back up at him. “No, we – I don’t date.”

“That’s right,” Sirius says, before he can think better of it. “You only fuck and run.”

Remus’s jaw clenches and something goes black behind his eyes. This is the Remus Sirius can imagine beneath a Dark Mark, this is the way he pictures Remus’s face whenever he has nightmares about pulling a Death Eater mask off of him. There is a part of him that wants to run, that doesn’t want to know if he imagines what he does because it’s true or because he’s caught in the air of suspicion surrounding the Order. But the reason he came here was for answers, or at the very least some kind of resolution, and so he stays and forces himself to stare straight at Remus as he speaks.

“I’m sorry…I didn’t…I almost died today. There was a duel and I almost got hit with a Killing Curse and right as it was coming towards me I saw these flashes of my life – which I can’t believe actually happens – and I thought of you, of us, and I just...I missed you. And…and…”

“And?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and watches those two words throw Remus utterly off-guard. “I’m sorry about what I wrote in the last letter I sent you, and about parading all those blokes through the dorm, and…and all the things I know I said to you when we were all drunk and I…I just wanted to hurt you.”

“You…” Remus stares at him with large eyes. “You really did almost die today, didn’t you?”

Sirius lets out a rough laugh and says, “Yeah. And I’m not even done. Because I am sorry for all those things but the thing I’m most sorry about is never letting you know…never telling you that – what those letters meant to me. How much I felt when I…” He feels himself stumbling over himself, trying to find the right words. It feels like being at high altitude, gasping for breaths that are usually so easy to reach. “They made me happy,” he tries, and then quickly amends, “You made me happy. When you came to visit me that meant everything to me, and I thought – I thought it was going to be the beginning of something, not the end. So when you sent me that last letter I just…you hurt me, so I wanted to hurt you. I didn’t mean any of it.” He swallows, has to ask: “Did you mean it? What you wrote me? That it was just a diversion, a little summer fun?”

Remus looks away. “Sirius,” he says, and then can bring himself to say no more, and Sirius knows that he’s going to have to be ruthless.

“Fine. Let’s try this. If I _had_ died today, is there anything you’d have regretted not saying to me?”

“Jesus, Sirius.”

“We’re at war,” Sirius shoots back, his voice rising. “What do you think is happening here? People we know are _dying. We_ are dying! There’s no more time for bullshit.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to tell me if you meant it,” Sirius says, and then, when Remus just stares at him, he shouts, “ _Did you mean it_?”

Something flinches across Remus’s face. “Yes,” he says, and Sirius’s stomach drops. But then: “And no.”

Remus sighs, and runs a hand through his hair. “I…we were sixteen,” he says, and then lets the statement sit there, because it does mean something to remember that they were young together, because that age signifies something they no longer are, and because, even though the years say otherwise, it has been a very, very long time since then. “And we found each other and it was fun.”

“Alright, so that’s the ‘yes’ part of your answer. What’s the ‘no’?”

Remus bites his lip and shakes his head. “Let’s not do this.”

But Sirius is too far out on this ledge to back down now, he can see this flashing towards him, he can feel the banked magic in his arm. And – he sees in Remus’s eyes a different sort of flash, one he hasn’t seen since they’d been alone together in his flat, and they looked at each other over the cheap wine Sirius had bought and Sirius had known with complete certainty that Remus was going to let him kiss him.

“I don’t have my wand,” he says flatly, loudly. “Overused it in the duel. Whatever you want to do to me you can do. You can stop me from talking if you really want to. Or you can answer me. You can tell me, again, that it meant nothing. Just look me in the eyes this time when you do it.”

Remus is plainly shocked by this. He scans Sirius with his eyes again, and Sirius turns his pockets out. He throws the knife away from him, and it skitters across the floor. Remus turns to look at and he doesn’t look away until it slides to a stop inches from the hot plate. He looks at Sirius again and Sirius says, only, “Remus. Please.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor,” he says quietly.

“Not telling me why isn’t doing me any –”

“No. The letter. I thought I was doing you a favor.” Remus runs his hand over his face, has to take a deep breath before he meets Sirius’s eyes again. “I know you, Sirius. More than anything else you’re incredibly loyal. I knew if – if what we had became something more you’d feel obligated to stay and I didn’t want to do that to you. It would’ve felt like locking you in with me each moon. It would’ve felt like – like biting you, condemning you. I love you, so I couldn’t do that.”

Sirius feels everything inside him start reeling and for a moment it’s all he can do to stand up straight, let alone gather his thoughts to speak.

“I had to end it,” Remus goes on. “And I thought if I did it through a letter you’d –”

“But you _did_ bite me.”

Remus halts partway through a word, his lips caught on a syllable.

“Several times if I recall correctly. And I enjoyed it. I think you did too.”

Remus flushes. “Listen, Sirius –”

“I have to say that didn’t feel like condemnation so much as come-demnation,” he says, and Remus flushes further, “which is a ridiculously terrible sex pun but what’s even more ridiculous is that you would actually believe that. Merlin, Remus, who can say what you and I being together would’ve been like. Maybe we would’ve driven each other mad after two weeks and had to break up. Maybe we would’ve gotten married and grown apart after twenty years together only to be reunited by our meddlesome children who don’t want to see us get divorced – don’t look at me that way I’ve seen it happen in Muggle films – or maybe it would’ve been something totally different, but what I can tell you for sure is that I would’ve never felt like you were condemning me.”

“You don’t know what you might have felt if we’d kept dating.”

“That’s exactly my point, Remus. I don’t know what would’ve happened. You don’t know what would’ve happened.” He takes a step towards Remus, his palms flat open in front of him in entreaty. “You think it’s going to be something bad. I think it’s going to be something good. Don’t you want to know who’s right?”

“It’s too late,” Remus says, shaking his head.

“Is it? You just said you love me – not loved. Love.” Remus goes still everywhere but his eyes, which dart around, looking for escape. “I love you too,” Sirius says, and Remus’s eyes lock on him. “Don’t you want to see what that could mean? What that could be like? I know you wanted to cut this off to spare us both pain, but guess what, we’re at war and pain is where we live now. And I don’t know about you, but it’d be nice to make something instead of trying to kill and capture for a change.”

Remus looks away again and a quick contortion of emotion passes over his face. He closes his eyes and though neither of them knows this yet they have reached a moment where this single, seemingly small decision will save or cost lives, will end the war or prolong it. Remus feels some of the weight of this – as he feels the weight of each of his decisions – but Sirius is insensible to it. He only feels what he knows to be love shared between them; and now that he knows this he can’t stop himself from doing what he’s longed to since he arrived, and he reaches out to lightly brush at the new gray at Remus’s temple. Remus neither flinches nor leans into the touch. He keeps his eyes closed as Sirius trails his fingers across his cheek and jaw. He tips Remus’s face up. He can feel Remus’s heartbeat beneath his fingers. He can feel Remus’s breaths on his wrist. 

“Remus,” he says, soft, a question.

Remus swallows and opens his eyes. “Tonight,” he says. “Because you clearly need to be shagged badly.” Sirius lets out a soft laugh. “But tomorrow – tomorrow I can’t promise.”

Such an inauspicious, insignificant offer, and what will it mean? It will mean a night together, and part of the morning. Breakfast, and the slow, slightly embarrassed talk of old friends trying to get to know each other again. It will mean a week without speaking – Sirius fretting that he’s blown his second chance – and then Remus will arrive at Sirius’s flat with takeaway and the knife Sirius left at his flat. Another night caught up in each other, and this time half the next day. James will call for Sirius that night to explain about Voldemort wanting to kill Harry, to ask if Sirius will be their Secret Keeper. Sirius will agree, although he knows it will mean his death. He will go to Remus’s, wanting some last comfort before he goes to ground, wanting him to know that he’s not disappearing because of him. He will bring with him an expensive wine that makes him talk too much, and that makes him confess his fears: all of them, even the one that Remus is a Death Eater. Remus will be upset, but not for the obvious reasons. It will turn out that he had thought Sirius was a Death Eater too. Together, they will trace the details of their suspicions and find their source: Peter. They will trail him together, they will see him entering a Death Eater hideout. They will tell Dumbledore, and Dumbledore will apprehend Peter, and with the scant information that Peter knows about Voldemort’s movements, the war shifts. James and Lily will live past October, Voldemort will be defeated at the beginning of the following year, and in the spring, on a day when the summer seems more like a promise than a prediction, Sirius will convince Remus to move in with him.

But, before that, they will kiss each other, they will touch each other, they will remember each other, and find each other again.

**Author's Note:**

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